Amber Waves of Green

Guess what, compatriots? The gap between the richest and the poorest among us is now wider than it has been since we all nose-dived into the Great Depression. So GQ sent Jon Ronson on a journey into the secret financial lives of six different people on the ladder, from a guy washing dishes for 200 bucks a week in Miami to a self-storage gazillionaire. What he found are some surprising truths about class, money, and making it in America

How to Live on $625,000 a Week

As I drive along the Pacific Coast Highway into Malibu, I catch glimpses of incredible cliff-top mansions discreetly obscured from the road, which is littered with abandoned gas stations and run-down mini-marts. The office building I pull up to is quite drab and utilitarian. There are no ornaments on the conference-room shelves—just a bottle of hand sanitizer. An elderly, broad-shouldered man greets me. He's wearing jogging pants. They don't look expensive. His name is B. Wayne Hughes.

You almost definitely won't have heard of him. He hardly ever gives interviews. He only agreed to this one because—as his people explained to me—income disparity is a hugely important topic for him. They didn't explain how it was important, so I assumed he thought it was bad.

I approached Wayne, as he's known, for wholly mathematical reasons. I'd worked out that there are six degrees of economic separation between a guy making ten bucks an hour and a Forbes billionaire, if you multiply each person's income by five. So I decided to journey across America to meet one representative of each multiple. By connecting these income brackets to actual people, I hoped to understand how money shapes their lives—and the life of the country—at a moment when the gap between rich and poor is such a combustible issue. Everyone in this story, then, makes roughly five times more than the last person makes. There's a dishwasher in Miami with an unbelievably stressful life, some nice middle-class Iowans with quite difficult lives, me with a perfectly fine if frequently anxiety-inducing life, a millionaire with an annoyingly happy life, a multimillionaire with a stunningly amazing life, and then, finally, at the summit, this great American eagle, Wayne, who tells me he's "pissed off" right now.

"I live my life paying my tas and taking care of my responsibilities, and I'm a little surprised to find out that I'm an enemy of the state at this time in my life," he says.

He has a big, booming voice like an old-school billionaire, not one of those nerdy new billionaires.

"Has anyone said that to your face?" I ask him.

"Nobody has to," says Wayne. "Just watch what they're doing."

"You mean the Occupy Wall Street crowd?"

"Those guys are a bunch of jerks," Wayne mutters, giving a dismissive wave that says, They're just a sideshow. "Politically I'm on the enemy list. I've lived my whole life doing what I thought was right, and now I'm an enemy of the state."

Is he, though? It's true that income inequality is a reliable applause line on the campaign trail. Here's Obama in a recent speech: "What drags down our entire economy is when there's an ever widening chasm between the ultrarich and everybody else." Romney, meanwhile, likes to call this rhetoric "the bitter politics of envy." As he told a receptive crowd in West Palm Beach, Florida, "I believe in a merit nation, an opportunity nation, where people by virtue of their education and hard work and risk-taking and their dreams—and maybe a little luck—could achieve great things."

But the reality is that rarely are enemies of the state treated so well. Except for a brief stint in the late '80s and early '90s, their tax rate is at an eighty-year low. In the 1940s and 1950s, the top tax bracket paid more than 80 percent. It was 70 percent when Reagan took office, 40 percent under Clinton, and now, under Obama, it's 35 percent. But the very, very rich don't pay even that. By taking full advantage of an investor-friendly tax code, which takes a much smaller bite out of capital gains and dividends than it does for salaried income, the 400 richest Americans pay, on average, 18 percent tax.

Wayne won't reveal exactly what he pays now that he's at the top, but he's happy to tell me he began at the bottom.

"Have you read The Grapes of Wrath?" he asks. "That was my family. My dad was a sharecropper in western Oklahoma. When the dust storms came and everything got wiped out, they came to California. The guys with the mattresses on the tops of their cars in the movie? That was the way it was."

They had nothing. His father got a job winding coils that went into refrigeration units. Wayne grew up in east Los Angeles, went to college, joined the navy, got married. For a while he worked for unglamorous-sounding businesses with names like the Frieden Corporation, but nothing stuck. He had a couple of children. He wasn't thriving. He had to do something.

And then, in 1972, he had an idea: People have too much stuff and nowhere to keep it. So he bought some land in San Diego and put up a building with 200 self-storage spaces. "After that it was just building the units up, one at a time. For years and years. That's all. You don't get money unless you have a lot of talent, which I don't have, or you work hard, which is what I do. We don't have any golden touch here."

"How many buildings have you got now?" I ask.

"Maybe 2,300," he says. "With 500 or 600 units inside each."

Wayne says he never once stopped to contemplate the amount of money he was making. "I was just looking at getting the best locations I could and getting the buildings opened and getting the tenants and getting the cash flow and on and on," he says.

He shakes his head. "I don't spend any time at all thinking about my personal wealth. I suppose if I had nothing, I might think, 'I have nothing.' But when we decided to go public and I saw how much money there was, I was very surprised."

In 2006, Wayne was America's sixty-first-richest man, according to Forbes, with $4.1 billion. Today he's the 242nd richest (and the 683rd richest in the world), with $1.9 billion. He's among the least famous people on the list. In fact, he once asked the magazine to remove his name. "I said, 'It's an imposition. Forbes should not be doing that. It's the wrong thing to do. It puts my children and my grandchildren at risk.' "

"And what did they say?" I ask.

"They said when Trump called up, he said the number next to his name was too small."

When Wayne is in Malibu, he stays in his daughter's spare room. His home is a three-bedroom farmhouse on a working stud farm in Lexington, Kentucky.

"I have no fancy living at all," he says. "Well, I have a house in Sun Valley. Five acres in the woods. I guess that's fancy."

I like Wayne very much. He's avuncular and salt of the earth. I admire how far he has risen from the Grapes of Wrath circumstances into which he was born; he's the very embodiment of the American Dream. I'm surprised, though, and a little taken aback, by his anger. I'll return to Wayne—and the curiously aggrieved way he views his place in the world—a bit later.

But first let's plummet all the way down to the very, very bottom, as if we're falling down a well, to a concrete slab of a house in a downtrodden Miami neighborhood called Little Haiti.

How to Live on $200 a Week

A young man peers into a crack of sunlight that emerges from behind one of the sheets that block out all his windows. His name is Maurose Frantz, but he goes by Frantz. He can't afford air-conditioning, hence the sheets, so it's very dark and stuffy in here. Frantz lives with five other people—his mom, stepdad, grandparents, and little brother—and the entire house is the size of a typical suburban living room. As it happens, the view down the dusty, potholed street includes not only used-car lots but also self-storage facilities—the idea that made Wayne his billions.

"Outside is dangerous," Frantz says. "One time someone pulled up and said to me, 'Do you need a gun?' He showed me a gun! I said, 'I can't hear you, man.' Another time my grandpa—they jumped him. They took his wallet. They slotted him. He cried, he cried, he cried."

Frantz is Haitian. His accent is very strong, and I'm constantly asking him to repeat what he said: "They did what to your grandpa? They slotted him? Slattered him? Sorry?"

"Slapped him," Frantz replies. "Slapped."

Frantz washes dishes at the Capital Grille restaurant, a posh steak house near the harbor in Miami's financial district. He nets $200 for a twenty-seven-hour week and receives no food stamps or government assistance of any kind. That means he makes in an hour what I make in five minutes and Wayne makes pretty much every time he breathes in and out.

At the end of the week, Frantz gets an ATM card with his pay already loaded onto it. Sometimes when he clocks out at the end of the night, he says, he finds he's already been mysteriously clocked out by someone else. Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a restaurant workers' advocacy group, launched a class-action suit against Darden—the restaurant conglomerate that owns the Capital Grille—for this and other alleged improprieties. Frantz says he's repeatedly requested some kind of paper breakdown of how many hours he's been paid for and how much tax has come off, but they never give it to him, so he's stopped asking. He's also stopped asking for a promotion to busboy. He says they told him they'd let him know, but they never did. According to ROC United, the Capital Grille regularly denies promotions to dark-skinned people. It's possible for a black worker to become a busboy, Frantz says, but he's never seen a black server. Darden, for its part, maintains that the Capital Grille pays its employees fairly and that the claims of discrimination are baseless.

Last night, one of Frantz's co-workers threw away his shoes.

"I checked everywhere," Frantz says. "I checked in the garbage, but I couldn't find them. I called the sous-chef and I told him, 'I put down my shoes. Somebody threw them away.' He said, 'Frantz, you know me. I'm cool with you. I treat you like a man. I give you all the respect you need. I talk to you about your life.' I said, 'I know, chef.' He respects me, the sous-chef. He said, 'I don't know what happened to your shoes. I can't tell you nothing.' "

Frantz talks a lot about respect and the opposite of respect—humiliation. It's as if he's lowered his ambitions to the level that he can take all sorts of awfulness as long as people talk to him with a little respect. It occurs to me that his life might be better if he spent less time worrying about feeling disrespected and more time actively working to improve his conditions, but then I realize he is doing all he can. Putting his head above the parapet to talk to me is a brave step. (ROC United asked for volunteers on my behalf, and he was the one to agree.) But I can't see how his life will improve anytime soon. He's so far down America's financial pecking order he barely registers on it.

I ask Frantz to show me his neighborhood. He says there's nothing really to see. He rarely goes out—only to work and to church and to play soccer. Everywhere else is too dangerous. When we head outside, I scurry from his front door to the car. A smashed-up police cruiser lies abandoned on the corner. We take a drive past the one place on earth he has some fun: the soccer field in the public park.

Six miles later, we reach the Capital Grille. Usually he catches the bus, which takes an hour. When he works late and misses the 1 a.m. bus home, he has to stand there until the next one comes at 4 a.m.

"Do you ever wonder what the customers' lives are like?" I ask.

"I don't know nothing about the customers," says Frantz. "I've never seen them."

I look at him. "You've never seen a customer?" I ask.

"Never," he says.

"Do you know how much the steaks cost?" I ask.

"I never saw a menu," he says. "They're in the restaurant, not the kitchen."

His last words to me, before I head off to visit someone who makes five times what he does, are "If I get money, I'm going to leave."

How to Live on $900 a Week

Fifteen hundred miles from Frantz's neighborhood is a lovely leafy middle-class Des Moines suburb called Urbandale. There's mist and dew, and the lawns are so green they look painted. It's 7 a.m. and deserted and unseasonably chilly—a tornado warning will be issued in a few hours—but I'm sure in warmer circumstances I'd see children running around, in and out of one another's homes, and riding their bikes to school. The $900-a-week family who live here—Dennis and Rebecca Pallwitz and their two toddlers—have a ground-floor apartment in a tidy complex with a communal pool. Most of the properties here are detached family homes; theirs is an exception. I sit in their kitchen and tell them about Frantz.

"Oh," gasps Rebecca sympathetically.

"I know," I say. "Imagine living in Miami and earning a fifth of what you earn. The stress must be unbelievable."

"It's another world," says Rebecca.

The Pallwitzes' fifth anniversary is approaching. "We'd like to go to the east of the state where we had our honeymoon," Dennis says. "But—" he glances at Rebecca—"that would cost gas and food and a bed-and-breakfast stay, so maybe we'll stick around here, save the gas money, and get a hotel room for a couple of days."

"You can't afford to drive across the state?" I say in a startled screech. I sound like the Dowager Countess of Grantham from Downton Abbey. Speaking of which, last night in New York City, I got to see something Frantz has never seen: the inside of a Capital Grille restaurant. (I'm guessing Dennis and Rebecca have never been to one, either.) There were stag heads and sculptures of horses and fine oil paintings of generic earls and lords and fox hunts. The milieu was very English country gentleman, although an English country gentleman would never put an e at the end of the word grill. It was delicious, and I didn't even think about what it cost. Almost every waiter was light-skinned, but I did see one dark-skinned man serving. So that was nice.

"But there's lots of stuff to do here in the Des Moines area that we still haven't done," Dennis says, brightening. "So..."

"I know what I want to do," says Rebecca.

"What's that?" says Dennis.

"The drive-in movie theater and then the Incredible Pizza," she says. "The Incredible Pizza's got games and a buffet. You can pay $30, eat as much as you want, then play games until the money runs out. They have this tunnel thing going on. That doesn't cost anything. Our son can take his shoes off and run in there for a while...."

Dennis smiles, but I can tell he thinks Rebecca has evoked a crappy way to spend a fifth anniversary.

Dennis installs, maintains, and repairs "a wide variety of home medical equipment, oxygen equipment, wheelchairs, a smattering of everything." Rebecca stays home with the children. She says their problems are twofold: tas and health insurance.

"He gets paid every two weeks," says Rebecca. "For state and federal tas they take about $180. Then for health insurance they take about $375."

"The health costs go up every year," says Dennis. "And not just the regular 4 percent for inflation. It could be 10 percent, 17 percent..."

I ask them if they feel worse off than they did a few years ago. Rebecca says, "Yes, a little. The cost of everything, like health insurance, gas, and groceries, has been going up by leaps and bounds. Some things have even seemed to double. Versus our income not changing that much."

I tell them about the health system in my native UK—free health care for everyone. I say I remember Glenn Beck trying to scare America by saying that if ObamaCare went through, things would end up like Britain, with a savage, failing socialist health care system. "But it's not failing," I say. "It's great. And nobody has to pay anything." (Actually, it's funded by tas, and some parts of it work more efficiently than others, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a Brit who doesn't feel proud of the system.)

Dennis and Rebecca look at me warily, as if I might be pretending for some nefarious European socialist reason that the UK's National Health Service is a functional thing. But I'm not a socialist, and it really is.

The Pallwitzes have started seeking help at the local Food Pantry, a charity offering food to the needy. Rebecca says she was amazed that somewhere like Urbandale even needed a Food Pantry. But it does. And when she lines up, she doesn't see only derelicts. She sees middle-class families just like them.

Dennis says he wishes they were better off, but there are positives about being poor. It makes people community-spirited, he says. Plus, money can turn a man wayward. He runs a church support group for sex and drug and alcohol addicts. Why did some of those men fall into a hedonistic abyss? "Because they could afford to," he says.

This is a little heartbreaking to hear. It reminds me of Frantz. He rationalizes his place in America's economic ecosystem by saying it's manageable as long as people talk to him respectfully. Dennis rationalizes his position by saying that if he had more, who knows what pleasure-seeking temptations he might succumb to?

And there's something else the Pallwitzes have in common with Frantz. They, too, say they leave the house only for work and church and to go to the park. They haven't been to the movies in a year.

"How do you feel when you hear stories of the superrich getting away with paying hardly any tax?" I ask them.

There's a short silence.

"I'd probably do it, too, if I could," Dennis shrugs. "But I can't." He pauses and shrugs. "So."

How to Live on $5,000 a Week

Five times Dennis and Rebecca, there is me. I make about $250,000, double that in a good year—if, say, Hollywood is turning one of my books into a movie. Which doesn’t happen often. Just the once, in fact (The Men Who Stare at Goats). Being a panicker, I live my life convinced poverty and disaster lie just around the corner unless I constantly and frantically work. Which I do.

But I have none of Dennis and Rebecca’s struggles. I can vacation anywhere. I haven’t noticed rising gas and grocery prices other than hearing myself murmur a vague, "Oh. That seems a bit more," and then forgetting all about it. I have never felt so rich and so fortunate as I do when I drive away from Urbandale that morning. But the feeling doesn’t last.

How to Live on $25,000 a Week

A couple of weeks later, I meet the woman who makes five times more than me—$1.25 million in a bad year, up to $3 million in a great one. She wants to remain anonymous. I’ll call her Ellen. She’s a New York producer: movies, TV, Broadway. I meet her in London. She’s over on business. She’s brassy and loud and restless and alarmingly energetic and tough-looking, and she talks incredibly fast. She says it would be "too weird and stressful" to reveal her name, given what she earns. If you’re superrich or superpoor, everyone can see that. But in the top middle, one stays covert. Plus, she doesn’t want letters begging for money. She once had one from her father, who is a "pathetic gambler."

"How does it feel to make what you make?" I ask her.

I notice a strange tone in my voice. The usual chirpy sense of inquiry isn’t there. Instead I sound weirdly tense, as if the true reason for our meeting is for me to discover what I’m missing out on.

"Good," she says, nodding. "Happiness is having 20 percent more than you imagine needing. The trick is not to be too rich."

"Why not?" I ask her.

"People want to go on your private plane," she says. "You fall asleep in the middle of conference calls. There’s a certain discombobulation when you have too much."

Maybe Ellen’s right. Maybe it would be bad to have your own plane. But for a second, Dennis flashes into my mind, with his own imagined perils of having more money. I remember that Karl Marx line about religion being the opium of the people—his idea that the elites keep the masses subdued with illusory visions of heaven. But Dennis and Ellen have both suggested to me, surely fallaciously, that greater fortune might lead to unexpected sadness. In America, it seems, one’s economic standing can be its own kind of opium.

Personally, I wish I were better at opiating myself. Instead I’m sort of glaring at Ellen in a hostile manner, wondering how I might scramble up to her level.

"So what can and what can’t you do in terms of luxury living?" I ask her.

Thank God, I think. Becoming aware of what’s just out of your reach can be disconcerting. It’s comforting to know that having my own doctors would be massively out of my reach.

"But I know a guy who knows a guy," says Ellen. "I’m at a level where I don’t have to suffer. I’ve been sick. I had cancer. If you have money, you call the guy who knows the guy who’s the head of the department. The truth is, rich people with cancer versus everyone else with cancer? Longer life! And I didn’t think about bills at all! I have a bill? I throw it in the box. And that box goes to my business manager. This is a key item if you have money. You don’t look at the bills. When I got money, I vowed, ’Never again will I suffer the small stuff.’ To me paying a bill is the small stuff. ’I don’t care how the fuck it happens; someone pay that fucking thing!’ It’s a good feeling."

I listen and nod and think, I very much need a business manager. "How much do you pay your business manager?" I ask.

"A very small amount of money," Ellen says, "$100,000 a year."

There’s a silence. "That’s a lot," I say.

Ellen looks at me, surprised. "No, it’s not," she says.

She explains that her business manager does many things for her: He runs her office, does her bookkeeping, oversees her investments, files her tas. And even though she pays him what can amount to nearly 10 percent of her income, she has some money in the bank, so she can afford him.

Rarely has an interview awakened in me so many dormant desires. Before meeting Ellen, I had no idea I needed a business manager and a friend who knows top surgeons personally. I was a lot happier before this interview began.

"I still worry about bills," I say sadly. "And I get knots in my stomach when the tax is due. Really big knots. Have you worked out how to pay less tax like really rich people do?"

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